“Ex Nihilo Nihil Fit”

I watch documentaries. They tell me things like,

“The Universe is 17 billion years old.”

They make vague analogies and models

to support these claims, and fit it all into

an hour format for PBS or whomever.

A cabal of astrophysicists meet in secret

and decide, in presumptive but elaborate and

esoteric equations how it all works so that

that they can publish these findings.

And who will know the difference?

Ex nihilo nihil fit. One of my favorite expressions.

It means, in Latin, “From nothing nothing comes.”

Something cannot come from Nothing. Well, for me

it's a problem. It is the nagging question which pervades

my days and nights. It prompts the question I can not answer.

What is the Universe in?

I'm not disciplined to study thoroughly what may,

without guarantee, lead me to answers or more questions.

I'm also heartbroken. I thought about seeking solace in a wat,

but let's be real. I'm an iconoclastic bastard, not a monk.

Life, with a divine entity or without, breaks my heart.

The selfishness, cruelty, inconsideration of my modern

fellows breaks my heart. I dream of an island, and a muse,

a beautiful girl who wants to have my children and I

do things like fish and hunt wild boars. It's an empty dream.

Gauguin went to Tahiti to paint. Now there are seven billion

people living on this planet. So few places to hide. Call me

a coward, but that is exactly what I want to do: hide. When

the doctors tell me I'm mentally ill, I have to ask, “Isn't that

very much appropriate?” Death would be better than the lives of 95%.

Funafuti 8°31'S 179°13'E … unlikely

Nanumea 05°41'S 176°09'E … unlikely

Nui 07°13'29"S 177°09'37"E... unlikely

Nukufetau 08°00'S 178°22'E … unlikely

Nukulaelae 09°22'52"S 179°51'08"E … unlikely

Vaitupu 07°28'S 178°41'E … unlikely

They found what they believe to be some of Gauguin's teeth

in Tahiti. Like the life preserved as it was stopped by Pompeii in '79.

I can't know if Gauguin was happy, no matter how young

and how preserved the girls were from the institutions of shame.

But he did it. He said it, which often is a curse, and then did it.

My escape from this particular suburb of Dis will have to be different.

I will have to steal away into the night, with a backpack full of socks,

underwear, and some cash. I will require the same faith

that I seem to have lost along the way. I will have to let the judgments

of others slip off me the way rain does down and umbrella, or a raincoat.

So, while I draw up prototypes for tinfoil-lined umbrellas,

(so as to keep them from their mind reading / controlling rays)

in doing so, I keep my head full of broken heart above the water,

the waves which will drown me, I bend time. No, I don't bend it, I bide it.

If I could bend time, I'd be up to much more scintillating endeavors.

It will be me in this 17 billion year old Universe, for a fleeting millionth of a second

seeking that relief, that transcendental drunk from a wine fomented from grapes

grown on the vines of absurdity. In Judaism, there is a tenet that we (humans)

will never know god's face. Einstein, with his shock of hair, antennae for the cosmos,

said prophetically, “I want to know god's thoughts. The rest are details.”

The Devil in me. The Daniel Webster I aspire to be. These are at odds.

17 billion years ago, let's just say they're right. The “Big Bang” happened.

Great. So, please tell me, what was there before that big bang.

And if you say something like it was super-dense compaction blah blah blah, please

tell me it was a super-dense compaction of WHAT? And what before that!?

The stars whisper secrets. They have for longer than we were around to see them.

They whisper about dreams, and wishes, and to astronomers, they whisper about time,

but they mock me in symbol. Their very presence says “We see you, hahaha!”

Like peepholes for the superspatial beings. I know that creatures such as us,

who can't see, for the most part, our hand in front of our faces, can't answer these questions.

However, the questions remain. So, if I go to the Large Hadron Collider, and,

with some silver tongue explain my broken heart,

manage to get them to explain the whole thing to me, I can leave mended.

Perhaps I can get a job at the post office and a mortgage.

Love is in the Large Hadron Collider, baby. But only for a millionth of a second. Then it's gone.

par Giosue ben Dawell

Written on Demand

This is what scares me. The silence of night

it feels like shelter, but it's temporary

and that is never forgone. There is no sanctuary.

There is no lover. There is no family.

There is no cabin or penthouse or basement apartment.

I'm also as lost as any Priest or Rabbi or Seargant at Arms, any Worshipful Master

that I might have met.

There is nothing I believe in that

is worth dying for, and nothing I feel

worth living for.

This scares me.

The bridge outside the window tells me the day and time like

a 720000 ton clock, the machinery of society.

When the traffic starts again,

it will be followed by the sun and a day,

where the world expects me to participate.

How?

How the fuck do people care about any of it?

What's missing in me? What is the antidote?

I consider this: I am similar to other primates.

I have a vestigial tail, opposable thumbs, similar sensory organs.

Indeed, most of me is shared with my brethren

in any shrewdness of apes.

I'm weaker, but my brain is larger.

What good is it doing me?

If I am the 18,000,000^th cousin 10^23^rd removed

from any given cartload of monkeys,

and so, in effect, an animal, which is, to be fair,

more honest and obvious to me

than the rest of human-ness,

where am I left on this gyration

of elements, iron and oxygen, rust and salt, ice and water,

this spinning mass with a gravity that

holds me prisoner?

The mind has captured the heart.

And it imprisons.

To escape!

Like Hermes and Nikes and angels and demons, monkeys with ~wings~,

but still they must move bones to flap them.

The bat flies like I walk;

The bat is also a brother, but it too hides in the night.

So, I sit.

I know to keep shit separate from sleep.

I know simple things,

which will remind you

if you forget them,

like tying my shoes.

When I see they're untied,

or I trip.

I could build, but to what end?

You see, this candle, the sun, which I hide from,

that truly I know with my big monkey brain that I need to live,

for any life to live, will expire.

If, if what I know to be true is true, that is.

If I go any further trying to explain it to myself

I will fall into a solipsistic black hole.

So I sit. I try to deal with simple things. Somehow still I fail.

I can't fight gravity. I can't build anything that will outlast the wind.

I can't carve my being into any stone, any amount of Mt. Rushmore

that will outstand Gamma Ray Bursts and post-stellar nebulousness.

The atoms stuck between my teeth,

in my earwax

are as subject to the vicissitudes of time

as any that made up the first ape-coprography,

the latest columbite-tantalite contraption,

the great texts of the great libraries and great mens' brains.

It's all the same.

In an absolute scale of time,

if such a thing can be considered,

as opposed to a relative one,

none of this for-the-birds bullshit adds up

to anything but the sum of parts.

Maybe, in that absolute scale I am really in that solipsistic hole

but hear me!

If the diaphanous veneer of this aether is weathered over enough time,

matter following that law about entropy will, eventually,

after all the atoms' antics are played out,

present a nice, even, shitty sleep.

Won't it?

Never restful, never fitful.

Never rejuvenating, never haunted by nightmares.

Never anything at all, really. And that is the state that I am in.

Maybe I'm wrong.

I'd say I need sleep,

but I've already tried sleeping.

Maybe the Universe is a fantastic banger of a machine,

and all my whining and wailing

could and should be silent wonder.

This is not how it feels, though.

Humbly.

Two Pairs Fallen

Raffiniert ist der Herrgott, aber boshaft?

Every moon that rose, at least, the ones

I remember, made Lūnae, Veneris, what

named day of the week, so much less important

than the weather, sex, and dreams of tongues. And so

how do I know the words “lucciola” and “folletto”?

It all ended something along lines like these:

John was a perversion of his own ethics. The

most disturbing part was how well he knew but

Rebecca knew I had passed it on to Erik

so when she hit me she need no remorse feel

and Melanie and Basha made rites of the

nights we spent hiding from gravity's invasions

while Emily never gave up her day job

when I would appear, on bisat Sulaiman,

it would mean that I would need to be more of

human than ghost. Aradia translated (again)

between Providence and New York assured through

voices of Ionna, Elisabeth, and others

that what Great Mechanick there is, showing its

faces in improbable odds that I, right

then, was meant to be so fucking lucky

that I would grab a shoeshine on my way in

wearing really awesome suits and ties. So

when I won, Emily. But after that, Yana

the Russian, became the middlegirl of the

connection. She walked me down that primrose path

but when I saw the River of Styx, alarmed

I flew from the vice of the NYPD

to the Pacific. Keri and Ava cast

the spells conjured somniculum. Gain enough

to jump the Atlantic. Transcontinental

the runway stopped. I needed, really really

needed my passport. This sounds false but it's true

it was in the basement of C.I.A. How

much was that Great Architect willing to grant

favor me? That much more. In Paris I stopped

laid on a cemetery wall, laughed silver

like a child hopped up on goofballs and smiled through

red strained lips and teeth. The joke was soon over

So I found Gogol and offered him a deal

No derelict can refuse. He set me up

At Château Rouge, taught me the french I needed

– the most important words, “Cherche des Skenan”–

while mischievious magrebs purveyed goods and

I had not-quite sex with another, future

State Department courtesan. Elizabeth

outclassed me, but there was a long recording

and then! Gemma brought it all to presque-vu

when she asked me the question my life was, had

been. Before, Chealsea (Drugstore) and I spent nights

At the Chelsea Hotel. Breathing for her on

more than one occasion. Towers, their doormen

Never understood preferences for taxis

over nine-one-one. Elisabeth at least

came-to by the time I got her out of the

restaurant. So Gemma in the squat party

Châteaudun, Gemma, asking me if I knew

any way out of the fucking nightmare and

could I take her, Gemma who I would love and

“No, I am lost,” but I said, “I know a place

(Raffiniert ist der Herrgott, aber boshaft?)

Gemma, Brixton.” Portuguese junkie “tea-leaves”

like Manuelo and Toza who lived that day

and at three, darkness. Piss, the safest water

from cock to hand then injected in the blood

is, however disgusting, why I don't have

Hep C, HIV... Der Hergott saw me take

Gemma, and I, make wedding vows in Vegas

(Elvis long dead, was present for the rite). Mom

– honest, I wasn't hatched from an egg – said that

she couldn't come because it undermined her

against sister's catholic wedding service and

ten years had now passed. Some have been omitted

if not one of them more or less innocent

than another. I failed Gemma. Not for want

of will, or fear, or some lack of character

like. I was only given a score and ten

So I appealed to der Hergott-psychopomp-

top of my skull. This time I was transported

to the first panel of Tuin der Lusten

where my imminent death was given reprieve

in water and sun and all things that are good

for the soul. Boschaft ist der nicht. I would live

another day. Nothing more. Gemma phoned me

as I rode on a bus. I wasn't going to meet

her in Belgium and she wasn't coming to me in

Florida. That was over. I cried for two

stops. To be fair I shouldn't even be alive now.

Unused

She Called the Hospital

If I were a better liar,

a better chess player...

If I had the type of mind

that sees social strategy

I never, even being so

very young, would have

walked into her office

and told her the truth.

They were the philanthropists.

They were brilliant.

They were lovers of men.

But me? My truth wasn't OK.

When asked whether it was

a matter of pounds or dollars

I should have said dollars.

Less exotic, more common.

It cost me the sort of chance,

the once in a lifetime

opportunity, that I carry guilt

for having already had too many.

Maybe it's not guilt.

Perhaps that's shame.

Either way, the redux is:

I'm a horrible liar.

She told me stories

of hearing Jerry Springer

in the background blaring.

In those days you could smoke.

That I didn't have a room

That they wouldn't give her

any information about me

gave rise to suspicion.

I called my bank and...

the machine voice told me

in so many words that

I had several thousand.

I left. I still could have lied.

From the Dark Annals of My Dreams

It was a suburban neighborhood.  I was exiting one or another house, and as I did so, she walked to make her entrance.  I was unsure if she was going to feign an unawareness of my presence.  At first it seemed that way.  It was then impossible.  But I was distracted, which I counted as some advantage, some protection.  When I confronted her to greet her not knowing how I should do that, I saw her eyes see mine.

I can fly in my dreams.  It's a regular thing.

I had that business that distracted me, but I flew up and out and around a tree.  When I came back, like some boomerang, she was walking away.  I threw a tantrum where I ripped the trees apart like a scythe, cutting swaths of them with my anger as I spun.

When I woke up, I meant to remember it.

Capitulation